Picked-Up Pieces (42 page)
Authors: John Updike
The New World to the Old is a hemisphere as disappointingly empty as the heavens. Alain, seeking to save himself, flees to New York and only deepens his plight. Of course, there are differences: Paris is a “lingering, low fever,” whereas “New York, at least, was an open atrocity.” But the two cities, as spiritual ciphers, are interchangeable. The faddish artistic scene of post-Surrealist Paris strikingly resembles the Camp of contemporary Manhattan:
Among other delusory projects, Alain had thought of opening a shop in Paris or New York to sell all those dated, ugly, or absurd objects which industry, hovering between the popular and the vulgar, has produced in the last fifty years.
And the lean and sketchy style of the novel itself belongs to the Franco-American world of Hammett/Simenon detective novels and Bogart/Gabin movies and their Existentially fortified
nouvelle-vague
descendants; these things are thin with the thinness that implies a background of immense loss. Drieu La Rochelle is not as cool as his material—hence
his erratic imprecations, his disturbing efforts to steer his tale toward an unsighted morality. But this roughness of tone touches the narrative from a source outside itself and recalls a context beyond the mechanical and mocked world Alain haunts, a context in which his extinction can be felt, momentarily, as a waste:
For him, the world was a handful of human beings. He had never thought there could be anything more to it. He had never felt involved with anything larger than himself. He knew nothing of plants, of the stars: he knew only a few faces, and he was dying, far from those faces.
A character in
The Fire Within
is described as “admiring spontaneously only the eccentrics of the past, from Byron to Jarry.” In Alfred Jarry we encounter, at the beginning of the century, a personality and an art more radical than the regretful nihilism of Drieu. The art was a copious but incidental emanation of the personality, and Roger Shattuck’s chapters on Jarry himself, in
The Banquet Years
, are more readable than the
Selected Works of Alfred Jarry
, which Mr. Shattuck and Simon Watson Taylor have edited. Descriptions of Jarry’s bizarre person abound. André Gide remembered him as he was around 1895:
This plaster-faced Kobold, gotten up like a circus clown and acting a fantastic, strenuously contrived role which showed no human characteristic, exercised a remarkable fascination at the
Mercure
. Almost everyone there attempted, some more successfully than others, to imitate him, to adopt his humor; and above all his bizarre implacable accent—no inflection or nuance and equal stress on every syllable, even the silent ones. A nutcracker, if it could talk, would do no differently.
A schoolmate, C. G. Gens-d’Armes, wrote:
When he opened the valve of his wit, he seemed to follow after the stream of his words without any control over them. It was no longer a person speaking but a machine driven by some demon. His jerky voice, metallic and nasal, his abrupt puppetlike gestures, his fixed expression, his torrential and incoherent flow of language, his grotesque or brilliant images, this synchronism which today we should compare
to the movies or the phonograph—all this astonished me, amused me, irritated me, and ended by upsetting me.… His originality was too much like some mental anomaly.
These quotations convey the eerie mechanical quality of Jarry’s personality, or, more precisely, its insane immersion in mechanism. Virtually a midget, he insisted that the theatre appropriate the rigid ultra-reality of the marionette theatre, and lived the last years of his life in a half-floor apartment where normal-sized visitors had to crouch. Fascinated by bicycles, hydrology, physical experiments, and machinery of all sorts, he fuelled himself on alcohol and ether and did not so much die as break down; friends knocked on the door of his cupboard and he could not answer because his legs no longer worked. His last request was for a tiny tool, a toothpick. The nickname given him by a hostile critic—“La Tête de Mort”—was earned. Jarry himself had christened his first apartment, a cell at the foot of a dead-end alley, “Dead Man’s Calvary.”
Certainly there is little life in Jarry’s writings. “I imitate nothing,” he once said, and his works more resemble graffiti, cartoons, technical treatises, and verbal games than novels and plays seeking to portray human life in action. He achieved fame in 1896 with
Ubu Roi
, which was derived from schoolboy skits perpetrated against an incompetent science teacher in the lycée at Rennes. Its first word is a modified obscenity, and its hurly-burly of schoolboy cruelty and Shakespeare parody (a monstrously simplified Falstaff murderously ascends to the throne of a nonexistent Poland) does not make very good reading now, especially since New Directions has seen fit to publish the play in a scribbly novelty format.
Ubu Roi
—whose first performance occasioned a riot in the audience and left a young spectator from Ireland, William Butler Yeats, to conclude momentously in his journal, “After us the Savage God”—now in its bare text wears the sadness of a faded program, a testament to vanished fireworks.
Selected Works of Alfred Jarry
begins with several sequels to
Ubu Roi
, in which Jarry exercises a more mature wit and allegorizes his instinctive anarchism with scenes such as Ubu flushing his conscience down the toilet. But the outrageousness of such farce does not liberate; rather, one feels suffocated by a stunted sensibility and an arbitrary cruelty. As with the currently admired school of neo-pornography (e.g.,
Last Exit to Brooklyn
), the author’s participation appears suspiciously enthusiastic.
Jarry seems to be having most of the fun in passages like (from
Ubu Cocu
):
There’s nothing to be done with him. We’ll have to make do with twisting the nose and nears [
sic
], with removal of the tongue and extraction of the teeth, laceration of the posterior, hacking to pieces of the spinal marrow and the partial or total spaghettification of the brain through the heels. He shall first be impaled, then beheaded, then finally drawn and quartered. After which the gentleman will be free, through our great clemency, to go and get himself hanged anywhere he chooses.
And this repellent note of inhumanity, of frenzy, runs through Jarry’s fiction as uncontrolled hyperbole. The novel
Messalina
is not meant to be absurd, but at the height of applause in a great stadium we are told that “the sound of Messalina smacking her lips dominated the uproar.” While she is being impaled on a sword, a bystander behaves most strangely:
“But it is a sword blade, carrion,” slavered the freedman, “it is not a …”
But it was he who then sobbed out aloud and prostrated himself as though struck down by a god; and he buried his face in the ground, biting at the flowers whose perfume throbbed with his cry:
“But I love her! I love her!”
Purple is too pale a word for such passages. Jarry’s non-fiction is better controlled: his remarks on dramaturgical science, calling for a theatre of “man-sized marionettes,” are, though irascible in tone, cogent. His scientific and blasphemous essays show demonic ingenuity and humor. After reading H. G. Wells’s
The Time Machine
, Jarry, with a relentless wealth of engineering detail, set down plans for one, consisting of an ebony bicycle frame mounted on three gyroscopes aligned with the three planes of Euclidean space. In “The Passion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race,” the Cross becomes a bicycle “constructed of two tubes soldered together at right angles”—“and it is worth mentioning in this connection that Jesus rode lying flat on his back in order to reduce
his air resistance.” Jarry’s mad hyperbolism veers close to profundity. Refuting the notion that a bicycle rider should pedal slowly to contemplate the view, he argues:
He should … make use of this gear-equipped machine to scoop up forms and colors as rapidly as possible while whizzing along roadway and bicycle track; for fueling one’s mind with crushed, confused fragments relieves the memory’s secret dungeons of their destructive work, and after such an assimilation the mind can more readily recreate entirely original forms and colors. We do not know how to create out of nothingness but we are capable of doing so out of chaos.
His faith in unconscious (and therefore natural) processes is serious; he describes what must have resembled his own method of composition:
Sengle constructed his curiously and precisely equilibrated literary works by sleeping a solid fifteen hours, after eating and drinking, and then ejaculating the result in an odd half hour’s scribbling.… Some professors of philosophy rhapsodize that this resemblance to natural processes partakes of the ultimate Masterpiece.
Although
Selected Works of Alfred Jarry
contains only a few chapters of what Professor Shattuck elsewhere calls “the best of his novels,”
Les Jours et Les Nuits
, and omits entirely “the most difficult and personal of all his texts,”
L’Amour Absolu
, it includes
in toto
his exasperating “neo-scientific novel” entitled
Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician
. ’Pataphysics, a concept present in Jarry’s earliest work, is “the science of that which is superinduced upon metaphysics,” or more fully:
’Pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments.
Faustroll
grew from Jarry’s planned treatise on ’pataphysics, which was modified by a desire to “create a cast of characters to incarnate, practice, and expound the new science.” Professor Shattuck’s description of the inchoate hybrid that resulted is usefully succinct: “Jarry’s good doctor is born full-grown at the age of sixty-three, navigates unendingly across
dry land in a sieve, and travels everywhere with a summons server who is trying to collect some hundred thousand francs of back rent from him.” In addition to Panmuphle, the summons server, there is Bosse-de-Nage, a dogfaced baboon whose only utterance is an intermittent “Ha ha.” Beginning with a replica of the summons and ending with a geometrical discourse on the “surface of God,” the book follows the adventurers through several hydrological experiments, visits to many islands, each inhabited by an artistic acquaintance of Jarry’s, a banquet ending in a holocaust, a succession of prose poems, Faustroll’s death through drowning, and his resurrection, or unravelling, into the happy condition of Ethernity. Such a summary makes it sound more entertaining than it is. Though it contains some good metaphors and jokes, the tale is top-heavy with personal allusions and pseudo-science, clotted with obscurities, and darkened by Jarry’s infantile cruelty. Here is a specimen:
The isle of Cyril first appeared to us as the red fire of a volcano, or as the punch bowl full of blood spattered out by the fall of shooting stars. Then we saw that it was mobile, armored, and quadrangular, with a helix at the four corners, shaped like the four demi-diagonals of separate arms able to advance in any direction. We realized that we had approached within gun range when a bullet tore off Bosse-de-Nage’s right ear and four of his teeth.
“Ha ha!” stammered the
papio;
but the impact of a steel cylindrocone against his left zygomatic apophysis made short work of his third word.
How can one judge Jarry? Apollinaire expressed the hope that his weird works “will be the foundation of a new realism which will perhaps not be inferior to that so poetic and learned realism of ancient Greece.” Gabriel Brunet explained him by saying, “Every man is capable of showing his contempt for the cruelty and stupidity of the universe by making his own life a poem of incoherence and absurdity.” I think the second estimate more plausible; Jarry’s life, as a defiant gesture, matters more than his works, which are largely pranks and propaganda of a rarefied sort. Compared to Jarry, most of today’s so-called Black Humorists seem merely ex-admen working off their grudges in sloppy travesties of a society whose tame creatures they remain still. Though we cannot grant him the comprehensive sanity and the reverent submission to reality
that produce lasting art, we must admire his soldier’s courage and his fanatic’s will. He made himself into a Death’s Head. When Drieu’s hero Alain looks into the mirror, he sees evidence of the “terrible emaciations that a year or two before had begun to carve a death mask out of the living substance.” Time acts upon him; Jarry assaults time. Alain felt himself sinking in a spiritless and mechanical world, while Jarry, skimming along on his bicycle, turned himself into a machine, with a machine’s hectic ferocity and—though, unlike Ubu and Faustroll, he proved destructible—a machine’s self-disregard.
T
HE
R
UNAWAY
, by Albertine Sarrazin, translated from the French by Charles Lam Markmann. 480 pp. Grove Press, 1967.
A
STRAGAL
, by Albertine Sarrazin, translated from the French by Patsy Southgate. 172 pp. Grove Press, 1967.
Most men are potential desperadoes; but the concept of the female criminal seems paradoxical. Laws enforce a stability whose ultimate domestic unit is the woman herself; her physiology and psychology turn on the cultivation of inner space, while the man’s role calls for the conquest of outer space, for thrust and adventure, for arrowing forms of outward assertion as various as rape and theology, as admirable as scientific exploration and as deplorable as war. The most common form of female criminality—prostitution—is, however masked in toughness, an act of submission, and keeps the peace. True, the insect world (not to mention the world of literary criticism) offers striking instances of female enlargement and predation, but the unhappy history of the male praying mantis confirms that the seminal contribution to the generative process, though not negligible, is momentary and helps account for the primordial willingness of men to undergo risk. Granted that among the highest of the primates sexual instincts androgenously overlap, enough polarity remains so that we approach two autobiographical novels by a repeatedly jailed woman, billed on the dust jackets as “a female Genet,” with the expectation of something monstrous, delicious, and revelatory.
